“The best fish swims near the bottom”
Relocation is a big step, it can be challenging but not easy at all. Someone would take the chance and move forward. It could be an opportunity or a risk. We know for sure there are pluses and minuses, important is that if we do the math, we have a positive result. Why do people relocate? Are they chasing love or the lover, for a new job or a different experience? Do we have a bug for travel? At one point the reasons interact and at the end it’s about cultural exchange as we are influenced by ethnic and cultural ties and we find ourselves called expats if we really succeed in moving aboard, for good.
There are easy paths or difficult. One can find itself in a country where the language sounds so familiar though that cannot be spoken, be it from the lack of practise or the difference of pronunciation. This must be our first struggle or the impediment. And this is the best scenarios, other people move aboard not knowing the language at all. Sometimes a smile helps, sometimes they really expect an answer or an interaction.
The second thing from our luggage must be the word savings, palpable and enough for rainy days. With savings we can avoid many strange situations or avoid to compromise ourselves. For example: savings help us to make good decisions and not accept a less good paid job, in the first attempt.
Not in the last or third place, accommodation is a matter to survive. We often can hear: so lucky, where to stay, where to live, others start from nothing. Why in the world would someone move aboard without a minimal comfort or small assistance? We left behind those times when someone would walk from a place to another and would work for a piece of bread and a roof, there and there.
Anyhow based on our criteria and possiblility we go toward a cardinal point from where the dance begins the bureaucracy for a new driving licence, bank account, work permit; customs, barriers of understanding, underestimation; unfavourable environmental conditions. At the end of a day, we do good as we think after all it’s a foreign country and acceptance, tolerance are our new friends.
For those who study aboard first, then they decide to remain, things are not so complicated. They have already learned the customs and passed the heaviest test of adaptability. Another particular case, being one year aboard teaching English is called an extended expedition. Others take the chance to be the entrepreneur where in a fragile system everything is permissible and a business on a piece of paper can be remunerated. Let’s don’t forget those who are forced to leave their country because isn’t safe anymore and they become refugees and for them, things are really creepy.
Whatever moves us, we leave behind souls, things, memories, parts of us. We cannot carry everything. After years we discover that time has no boundary and blood is thicker than the water.
We admire our friends, the acquaintances those who really had the guts to earn an honest living aboard. Meanwhile we criticise them or own rulers who let that happens as we export some talents. And we ask ourselves why don’t the „rulers” relocate? Somehow we find that a circle is round and life has its cycle.
Atlas Tracer 